If you're in a position of relative power then ideas like "we should do better for our own,"* and "we must protect what we have from outsiders" are inherently going to be and/or flirt with reactionary ideology because it's built on ideas of superiority and privilege based on the exploitation and subjugation of the Other. When you're in a subjugated and exploited position then those same ideas instead become about liberation since they're about ending the subjugation and improving one's material conditions with one's own resources rather than resources stolen from others.

To put it another way, saying "our people must rule themselves" is reactionary when it's a dominant ethnic group in the imperial core saying it to argue for disenfranchising and removing ethnic minorities, but revolutionary when it's a periphery country arguing that its indigenous people must have self-determination and that its government shouldn't be ruled by foreign businesses and representatives of the imperial core. Although, obviously, it can still be reactionary in the periphery when used by a dominant ethnic group to argue for disenfranchising and purging marginalized minority groups.

* And I will say that, obviously, that can also be a revolutionary idea in the imperial core as long as it doesn't abandon the understanding that "the people deserve a larger share of this country's wealth" must go along with ending the fact that a huge portion of that wealth is being extracted from subjugated people in the periphery. Pushing welfare programs and workers' rights in the imperial core is perfectly fine as long as one is not also complicit in supporting imperialism and the propaganda that manufactures consent for it.